Category: developers journal

Relax, have a cookie!

Author: seven December 13, 2008

On last project we are working on, we decided to go heavy with browser cookie usage for saving user personalization settings locally instead of centralized (to database). Yes I know it slows down the page rendering, but please humor me in this exercise. Answer following questions truthfully:

  1. How often do you delete your browser cookies?
  2. Do you delete them at all (on purpose or automatically by an antivirus)?
  3. Are you afraid of browser cookies?
  4. Would you even consider using website which saves user personalization settings locally to your computer (and available only from that computer) vs. site that requires registration and login and then saves user personalization settings centralized?

The initial fear of cookies (or at least a “hype”) should have disappear over the past years, and people should have realized that much greater harm can happen to them via internet browser than a mere 4kb of random data stored in cookie.

So, the only real question here is – are cookies convenient enough method of saving personalized settings in modern web age? Are people so used to “click here to register” signs (let’s not forget fighting with captcha, leaving personal data, waiting for an email and activating account via email links hassle…) even only real benefit is ability to save personalized settings of that website???

cookiemonster

Author
seven
CEO/CTO at Nivas®
Neven Jacmenović has been passionately involved with computers since late 80s, the age of Atari and Commodore Amiga. As one of internet industry pioneers in Croatia, since 90s, he has been involved in making of many award winning, innovative and successful online projects. He is an experienced full stack web developer, analyst and system engineer. In his spare time, Neven is transforming retro-futuristic passion into various golang, Adobe Flash and JavaScript/WebGL projects.

    2 thoughts on “Relax, have a cookie!”

  • If only for saving web site preffs, no need for registration anyway. And no ral purpose for it. Cookies, go.

    On the other hand, if the preffs are many and require a lot of doing button clicking, then no go cookies.

    In any case, there’s allways the fabulous issue of the same user using a different browser.

    The good thing? with so many arguments on both sides, you can never be proven wrong! :)

  • Yo Tomo, thanks for the feedback!

    We will use cookies, and then migrate to login/registration as site will grow with features.

    Btw, for everybody who thinks browser cookies are evil The Unofficial cookie FAQ is good read. Unlike this bs for example.

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